1. Field of the Invention
The present invention, in general, relates to the field of multimedia communication and, in particular relates to Multimedia technology in handheld devices. The invention proposes adding a static thumbnail and a dynamic thumbnail to a video recorded in MP4 format with specific use-cases and advantages for each.
2. Description of the Related Art
Static Thumbnail—Video-based applications that need a first frame of the video to display (i.e. static thumbnail) require the video to be decoded. On a handheld device having limited processor speed and memory capabilities, this process typically involves the steps shown in FIG. 1.
After a caller requests a static thumbnail in Step 102 of FIG. 1, an entire MP4 (also referred to as MPEG4 or Moving Pictures Expert Group-4) video file is parsed to obtain the various ‘atoms’, i.e. video atoms, which is the MP4 file format in which specified data is to be stored, in Step 104 of FIG. 1. In Step 106, decoding and calculating the location of the video data stream that starts with an I-frame is performed, and a first frame is located and data is extracted in Step 108. The Video data stream is passed to the Decoder (usually a DSP or a backend processor in a handheld device), the video decoder is initialized and extracted data is passed in Step 110. Then, in Step 112, a first video frame is obtained from the Decoder and passed to the application. The Decoder is stopped in Step 116.
However, the above process requires a significant amount of time, especially on low power handheld devices. Further, the video decoding requires hardware support, which requires additional battery life, which can be depleted to obtain the first frame alone.
Animated thumbnail—Currently an animated video thumbnail is unavailable in a MP4 file. The above-described conventional technology suffers from the following limitations. Thumbnail display of video (by decoding and getting the first frame method) takes more time compared to the present invention. In devices where many thumbnails need to be displayed on a particular screen, the time can be considerable. On handheld devices, video decoding requires additional hardware/DSP support. To obtain the first frame alone, the hardware needs to be initialized, run and shutdown again—leading to consumption of additional power and battery drain. In addition, a user doesn't have an option to preview the video by playing back only a few selected frames. For very long videos, the user doesn't have an option, but must play back or doing a manual fast-forward manually. Conventional methods do not provide a very good user experience since the user must wait until all the video thumbnails are displayed, as in described above.